I am visiting my mom in Southwest Missouri, which is actually called in the business world the 4-State Area of Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Joplin. I was struck by the fact that I can hardly pick up any stations--even college stations on the radio that play portions of DEMOCRACY NOW, one of America's finest news stations.

So, I wrote up this piece for readers in the area of the 4 States in order to introduce the station and get them better news. The story is called--

From the Tillman cover-up to cover-ups on crimes of torure in Iraq,
bad development and explaining of counter-insurgency practices in
Afghanistan, and his foot-in-mouth interview with Rolling Stone,
Stanley McChrystal was likely a timebomb looking to go off in the years
and month before his forced resignation last week as head General in
Afghanistan.

Too many wimpy war-dogs have been simply licking their wounds in the
wake of the McChrystal Debacle (swan dive) in June. They neglect the
fact that June set a record for war dead from America in Afghanistan.

The FOX and Corporate media in America are simply covering up the
costs of the war in Afghanistan. Thank goodness that we have one good
bill in congress to help Americans. It is called the the War is Making Your Poor Act. (See link to Senator John Conyers interview on link above on the the War is Making Your Poor Act.)
In it he says, "The War is Making You Poor is a brilliant device by
Grayson, my colleague Alan Grayson, in which we're doing just three
things. One, we limit the amount of funding of the wars in both
countries. We eliminate the federal tax on all Americans that make less
than $35,000 a year. And as a result, and this has been confirmed by
the Joint Committee on taxation, we reduce the debt by almost $16
billion. Our debt. So it's a combination of things that are happening
now, Amy, that make it clear to more and more members of Congress that
you can't keep a straight face on all of this incredible indebtedness,
talk about all of the money that we have shovelled out to Wall Street
and credit isn't loosening up, unemployment is still at all-time highs.
We're projected in Detroit to have more foreclosures on homes than last
year. So we've got to turn with especially all of the shouts about
being fiscally conservative, the way to climb out of this is to reduce
the obligations of our government. Here we are in hundreds of billions
of dollars of war debt and our President is saying we now have to have
an emergency funding which is merely another way of saying we're going
to specially fund the Afghanistan surge. It makes no sensee and I thing
militarily it is not logical and of course morally, I can't remember
anything like this since Korea and Vietnam, to be honest with you."

Now, for those readers and listeners who haven't gotten the truth on
Stan McChrystaland why he shoul never have been head of the insurgency
and growth of the Afghanistan War in the first place". See the link
below.

In it, the interview (at the link above) "Michael Hastings, whose
article in Rolling Stone magazine led to the firing of General Stanley
McChrystal. Hastings' piece quoted McChrystal and his aides making
disparaging remarks about top administration officials, and exposed
long-standing disagreements between civilian and military officials
over the conduct of the war."

In the interview, Hastings explains in a nutshell how controlled by DOD and their propagaters America is here and abroad:

Hastings said, "There's the
structural problem in terms of the basic weight that the Department of
Defense has, so much so that even Secretary Gates has said, look,
D.O.D. has too much power, we need to give more power to the State
Department. And if you go back and read David Halberstam's "The Best
and the Brightest," the State Department was where the action was at in
the '50s and '60s and that sort of shifted to, and I forget who I'm
quoting here, but someone said, our defense policy is our foreign
policy. So I think those are very serious structural issues. Plus in
Afghanistan you have the supreme allied commander, that's not the
official title, which Petraeus is now, and then on the diplomatic side
you have a number of--often in some cases talented--diplomats sort of
fighting over who is the strongest diplomatic voice. Four or five
people. And I think there's now a sense that has to be clarified. I
think if there's a positive impact to the article. At lease if they're
going to do this crazy strategy, at least they might try to get it
right."

Later, JUAN GONZALEZ asked Hastings, "You also
write about General McChrystal in the case of Pat Tillman. He's the
former NFL star who joined the military after 9/11 and was killed while
serving in Afghanistan. The military initially said he died while
charging up a hill toward the enemy to protect his fellow army rangers
but in fact Tillman was killed by his own men in so-called friendly
fire. McChrystal was at the center of the military cover-up. This is
what Pat Tillman's mother, Mary, had to say about McChrystal when we
spoke with her two years ago. I asked her about a memo that McChrystal
wrote regarding her son."

MARY TILLMAN said in the 208 interview the f
ollowing about McChrystal, "This memo was a means of exonerating
Stanley McChrystal from having any kind of culpability in any kind of
coverup because on April 29, he sent this P4 memo, it's a personal
memo, to General Abizaid, General Kensinger, and General Brown that Pat
was indeed killed by friendly fire or at least suspected friendly fire,
although he's playing with language there because they did know--they
suspected it within 24 hours but by April 29 they knew. He's saying
that they should tell the president and secretary of the army because
they were going to be making speeches at the correspondents' dinner
that weekend and that they didn't want him or the secretary of the army
to make any embarrassing statements about Pat's actions if the
circumstances of Pat's death were to become public. Not "when' the
circumstances become public, but if.' Which suggests they had no
intention of telling us the truth unless they had to."

KEVIN STODA-has been blessed to have either traveled in or worked in nearly 100 countries on five continents over the past two and a half decades.--He sees himself as a peace educator and have been-- a promoter of good economic and social development--making-him an enemy of my homelands humongous DEFENSE SPENDING and its focus on using weapons to try and solve global (more...)